Topic: Speakers

MATERIAL:

To me loudspeakers have always been musical instruments. They should be low mass, free resonant, easy to drive and tunable. We do not make heavy over built boxes hosting damped woofers and tweeters. Why would we? Killing the sound is not our thing, setting it free is. These are not just words. Heavy dampened speakers cause distortion.

Heavy boxes? No thanks. Speaker dampening filler? We'll pass. Instrument shells that reproduce musical harmonics? Count us in.

Distortion develops when you don't know how to control vibrations through tuning and when you kill the sound through dampening the cabinet or air inside the cabinet.

The fact is, every acoustical instrument ever built was made based on a free resonant design. Free resonance means that the loudspeaker is designed to work with an acoustical environment and not against it. The air and sound pressure flow freely between the outside and inside of the cabinet with a fair exchange of motion.

This is the only way to introduce the sound waves to the room without acoustical distortion.


When you see the word "crossover" you should be very concerned about the speaker design that you are listening to. Over the years we have refined our cabinets and driver choices to the point of eliminating parts that block the signal from getting to your acoustical environment. The results have been the creation of the most open sounding speakers in the world.

"For years I used crossovers thinking they were a must in speaker designing. Engineers have made their claim to fame over driver control, but it wasn't until I designed low mass cabinets that I discovered the draw backs in disallowing the entire signal to get the drivers. When designers talk about controlling the woofer or tweeter what they are really saying is they are changing the signal before it gets to the woofer or tweeter. Being a student of music, why would I want to split the signal disturbing harmonic structures?"

For those who listen to unreasonable SPLs in dampened rooms crossovers are right down your alley. For the rest of us music lovers there is nothing more satisfying than the sound of real space, real size and real dynamics.

MATERIAL:

Fun talking designs vs sound. If speakers really did work how EE and AE designers say they did and if sound really did travel in straight lines and not (when introduced to a wall) stimulate pressure, which then stimulates the ear. I would go along (like most) with what I read until hearing differently. However the hi fi version of sound and the reality of sound, as we hear it every day, are miles apart. Hi Fi has disconnected from science (and it's origin) and over the years created (magically) it's own language. It's not a language that works outside of the audio industry but it sure digs it's deep roots in to the audiophile sociology.

A speaker vibrating creating distortion has no more truth to it than an instrument vibrating creating distortion. Vibration out of tune to the plus or minus is distortion period! The audiophile world has embraced a falsehood that has crippled the industry almost into extinction. The industry is plagued with horrible sounding systems and it's all because the simple "method of tuning" has been hard for the engineer types to swallow. Products come out, like my own, that produce music but they also produce paranoia among the fading powers at be, hanging on to theories that never proved themselves in practice.

Question to all. Is there a reviewer on the planet that has plopped down a pair of speakers in a room that has instantly not distorted till the system/room or movement of speakers has taken place? Of course not. Same goes for anything that vibrates. Energy is vibration and has always needed to be tuned to make it efficient or more in tune.

Working on the new production as we speak!

MATERIAL:

Quote :

I will add to Sonic's reply to you. As a 40 year plus music lover, I seek out lighter lower mass speakers, because they sound better than the usual high mass MDF based speakers to my ears.

The industry would be so different if we would have seen more of these designs early on. I look at how vibrant the musical instrument world is as compared to the audiophile world and shake my head. How could the audiophiles miss the mark by so far I wonder. As I mentioned in an earlier post and many times before, I was amazed at how this hobby from a design perspective got so far off track. "87" was my first CES and I was in shock to see the horrible efforts. I can remember being confused for a while cause the music world was all about the opposite from what I was seeing and hearing from thee audiophile world. For some reason there was this hold of mythological thinking that went on that defied music that permeated the thoughts of many if not most hobbyist. I heard this jargon before from egotistical studio engineers but blew off those techies and went about making good sound. Good thing about my early audio jobs was I was paid to make great sound not play the engineer of the month club.

Even before "87" when I had my stores in Georgia I was busy buying up all the hi end audio lines as it was fascinating to me after reading Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. They talked a great story and I was all over owning the best. My store was a whos who right out of the recommended components list. Still, I always heard something missing in hi end. There was a huge lack in openness. I hung in there as long as I could stand it but ultimately had to start making instruments "sorry" low mass tunable hi end audio Laughing .

Question to the high mass guys, played any 100lb guitars lately? or Played any mdf guitars lately?

MATERIAL:

please keep in mind that this info is probably something that Mosfet got from the audiophile text train and my answering is more of an in general one and not pointed at our tuning colleague

"IF CONE VIBRATION CAUSES THE ENCLOSURE TO RESONATE, THAT IS LOST ENERGY THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN USED TO VIBRATE THE AIR (conservation of energy)."

Why is it that audiophiles believe this?

Pluck a string and you will not hear much. Pluck a string attached to a guitar and you will hear tons.

Suspend a speaker in air and play something through it and you will not hear much. Attach a speaker to a cabinet and you will hear tons.

Where is the disconnect in the audiophile mind that doesn't get it? The movement of air alone doesn't produce sound. There must be a mechanical stimulus. No matter what type of frame or box is used to attach the driver to it is a part of the driver itself (mechanically). All someone has to do is try it so why do audiophiles get so hung up on non-truths? I have never in my whole life not heard the mechanical effect of one thing touching another in this industry. it's what I have built my whole life on. In fact as we study molecules we can see how this exchange works to provide all forms of matter and energy. But wait, then the audiophile calls any vibration that happens outside of their understanding "distortion". What Question Who pulled this non-sense out of midair.

Let me be very clear to those who are questioning this. If you had a speaker hooked up in midair and you had nothing to resonant after the speaker moved the air you would hear very little. Don't take my word for it, do it. We did! The audiophile world is full of myths that have absolutely no legs. No logical or scientific foundation. It's talk, but enough are saying it that people have excepted (only in this little crowd) as truth.

So let me rewrite this.

IF CONE VIBRATION CAUSES THE ENCLOSURE TO RESONATE, THAT IS a gain of ENERGY THAT increases the amount of volume TO VIBRATE THE AIR (amplification of energy).

Simple experiment: take your electric razor and turn it on outside with no walls around, or trees, or buildings, or close to the ground and listen to it a yard away from your ear. Not much sound! Turn it off, take it indoors and turn it on. Huge jump in amplification. Now set it turned on, on top of the back of a guitar. Huge jump again. This is called amplification. This is not distortion!! Exclamation Idea Very Happy cheers

Amplification : a natural or artificial device intended to make a signal stronger

EE audio designers egos are so big they can't except what is being taught over in the physics class as reality. They have gone down the wrong path for so long that they have removed themselves from the hobby of listening to the whole picture and made their quest marginalized at best. They must find the answer to audio in some other way besides nature. I'm telling you guys the absolute truth here. Look around at who these guys are, their scary. The bulk of the talkers in this industry are not in touch with logic. they really believe that on a moving planet there are fixed answers and they have them and no one else does. They have the example of musical instruments (in their same field of music) to follow and they won't. Go to the shows and see for yourselves. When ever there is something wrong with the sound they are blaming someone else and not taking any of the blame. I know, remember I was Mr. tweak who had to come in and try to make their sound work. Over the years I've had to put up with a bunch of cry babies, no kidding. I've walked into peoples rooms with a simple setup and blown theirs away not to make them feel bad, but to make music happen when their system couldn't. I've try my absolute best to make bad sounding badly designed stuff sound at least full range all my life but the facts are still the facts. In tuning we do stuff that transcends systems way past what these fixed, limited engineered components and speakers can even dream of doing.

Keep in mind I tune. I don't claim that the way I may want the sound of my guitar is better than your way. I just show you how to tune and guide you to the most tunable products I can find. Sometimes I spend so much time biting my tongue that my friends wonder when it's going to fall off. I know that many thousands of people wanted to believe in all these stories of great expensive components being built and talked about by the industries audio lords to be true. Magazines were made into empires and climbing the latter to the top was the ultimate achievement. And then, reality hit and many found themselves with prototypes made into products before they ever delivered the "whole sonic picture". The pressure of audiophile guilt was applied so stepping back into the real world would be looked at as a down grade. The truth of it has turned out to show that most in the hobby bought boat anchors, pretty ads, glowing articles and globs of rubber.

I say thank God the myths of the 80s, 90s and early turn are all but gone. Fortunes were spent on junk but maybe a few will actually survive to find the truth of their hobby. This is about things that vibrate and vibration is a good and pure thing. We just need to learn how to free it up and play it. Our intellect doesn't go on the shelf we just get to explore more relevant topics like electrodynamics, electromagnetics, harmonic balancing, mechanical transfer and many more. Basically discovering tuning and how it increases performance. If I could click my figures right now and make it happen I would make your system so simple as compared to what they are and make them highly tunable without blockage. As much as we all talk on here I still see tons of blockage being listened to all for the sake of things that don't work and aren't needed. And if it's not needed it's hurting the sound.

MATERIAL:

"The OTHER major problem with enclosure resonance is that this resonance itself produces sound and can cause a whole bunch of not easily detectable sonic problems, such as phasing problems that will produce cancellations and gains at various frequencies, We never notice these "enclosure harmonics", of course, as the the sound from the drivers drowns out any audible vibration of the enclosure. HOWEVER, this does not mean this sound is harmless. It often effects subtle sonic cues, imaging and soundstage qualities."

The more dense the cabinet the worse the problem.

As we were testing cabinets for the very first speakers we found and interesting fact. Thicker, more dense cabinets go out of pitch and cause far more phase problems than did the lighter weight thiner cabinets. The fact is the lighter we went in weight and density the bigger the soundstage and the more articulate the image. Keep in mind that these were cabinets built with tuning bar technology so there was a bolt keeping things under control. The thicker the walls of the cabinets got the more the notes disappeared and the out of phase sounds happened. Another example of the instrument world willing to teach us so much but our industry was not listening.

When I did internal testing on my cabinets I did them in comparisons to test that were made inside of musical instruments. This gave me a great understanding of tonality, pitch, wave cancellation and wave amplification. At the time I was the acoustician for UMI so having access to their facilities was priceless plus they and Martin guitar were kind enough to give me instruments to play with. Here's something I learned. If you have air moving around a driver (especially in a cabinet) you need supportive wave build up to avoid wave cancellation. When we put filler inside of the instruments the pitch went sharp and flat and became very unstable. Same thing happened to the speaker cabinets. Frequencies shifted upward and harmonics were lost. We play the instruments in the room, record them, and then tested the cabinets to see what it took to match the sound. We found that the more dense speakers and the filled speakers could not play the instruments in pitch and much of the musical content was missing. We did the same experiment with sound staging and found that the filled speakers could not make full size reproduction of the instruments and the free resonant cabinets did it to an astonishing space likeness. Another plus was we could tune the speakers to sound almost like the real thing. we then took a recording of the Indianapolis Symphony and played it. Some of the instruments in the recording sounded out of tune according to the musicians. on the over built over stuffed speakers they were stuck (the initials were W and B& something). On the tunable speakers we tuned up the instruments in the recording to the shock of the musicians.

Once again the myths of the audiophile experts put to death.

All of the stuff I do can easily be tested if someone cares to, but it all comes down to who pays the ads and keeps the lights on at the rags for one thing, and I would have to guess that the others who made their theories up didn't do their empirical testing necessary.

BTW if you guys read through the tuneland archives all this stuff is there but it doesn't hurt to bring it up again, especially if it helps someone get better sound.